"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." -Laura van den Berg

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.

Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane-this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 08/26/2025
ISBN: 9781639734740
Pages: 192
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.51w x 1.00d

Review Citations: Library Journal 04/01/2025 pg. 11
Publishers Weekly 06/09/2025
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/2025